Git is the established favorite for distributed version control. But Microsoft adding Git support to CodePlex is still something of a surprise.

Invented by Linus Torvalds, the a distributed version control system (DVCS) Git is sometimes said to be his greatest innovation, even more important than Linux!

Given that Microsoft was fully aware of the popularity of Git, see our report of a developer survey it conducted last July, perhaps the surprise should be that it has taken this long for its source code repository, CodePlex, to bow to overwhelming developer demand for Git support.

Announcing the news of on the CodePlex blog, Mark Groves wrote:

Finally, yes, CodePlex now supports Git!

acknowledging that Git has been one of the top rated requests from the CodePlex community for some time.

Later he adds:

the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical. Additionally, we just like it, we use Git on our team every day and making the DVCS workflows more available to the CodePlex community is just the right thing to do.

Up until now CodePlex has offered developers the choice of a version of Microsoft's TFS, which is a centralized version control system, and Mercurial, which, like git, is an open source distributed system but the lack of Git has probably been a factor in deterring developers choosing CodePlex rather than Github as their source repository.

Also in the blog post Groves says:

Giving CodePlex users what they ask for and supporting their open source efforts has always been important to us, and we have a long list of improvements planned, so stay tuned as we have more up our sleeves!

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